I finally read my records from Boston Medical Center yesterday. I have had them for a long time.
Both the visits and the medication were voluntary treatment that I initiated. Although I knew that I wasn't delusional, I was also concerned that the stress of being persecuted by the conglomerate would give me a nervous breakdown. Hopefully, these records will dispel whatever rumors about drug addiction have circulated among people who watched me sleep for a minimum of 10 hours at a time while taking 25 to 50 mg of Seroquel.
This psychiatrist never actually said that she thought I was paranoid and delusional. She was noncommital. She was also, as subsequent pages show, useless at defending my sanity to anyone whom I asked her to speak to about it.
I could have read these records before, but if I had there was nothing that I could have done to make her believe me. I knew that.
People who don't have a psychiatric stigma don't know what discrimination is. They don't know the lifelong helplessness, vulnerability and fear. It is a living death sentence.
It is imperative that restrictions preventing psychiatrists from involuntarily hospitalizing and medicating patients not be lifted.
I had a 4.0 at Bunker Hill and thought that was how I'd end my first semester. Unfortunately, a particularly vicious harassment situation erupted in one of my classes near the end of the semester, due to one of the students having Google-searched my name and thinking it was funny to spend every class trying to trigger me. He even harassed me at my work-study job. I can't describe the feeling that I had when I realized that he wasn't going to stop, and when I knew that I was going to have to report it, knew that I wouldn't be believed, knew that my report would be turned back around on me and knew that I'd spend the last weeks of that semester fighting not to be expelled. That is exactly what happened. My studying faltered in my most difficult class and my final grades for that semester were 3 A's and an A-.
https://youtu.be/TFRDAvFxpOw
That's him coughing from the other side of the room. I stayed as far away from him as I could, and yet it was still that audible. He used to cough like that for the entire 3 hours and 45 minutes of classtime, every week.
I did nothing to provoke him and had cordial interactions with everyone around me despite my being 20 years older than almost all of the students. Eventually there was a day when I walked into class and people who had been friendly to me before wouldn't speak to me, so I guess he went around and told them all, including the teacher, what was being said about me online.
All I asked the school to do was stop him. I wasn't even trying to get him into trouble.
If a teacher in another class hadn't also Google-searched my name and decided to report as harassment our differences of opinion about literature, writing and the double standard that he used to grade my papers to the school's administration, the school might not have brought me up on charges for reporting the student.
By "double standard" I mean that almost everyone else in the class was functionally illiterate, so much so that after he received our first papers, he announced that he had set the lowest possible grade at C, awarded to anyone who turned anything in. Imagine my shock when my first paper was graded as a B+, especially since he knew I was living in a shelter and didn't have consistent access to a working computer to do research or improve drafts, which I couldn't do from my smartphone or tablet. I don't know why I couldn't access the school library's databases from the phone or the tablet, but I couldn't, and the tablet's keyboard was more or less broken. Although he offered to meet with me a couple of times in person, which I declined, he never did say to me that he thought I was harassing him. The first I heard about that was when I was in the Dean's office being brought up on charges, after I had asked for help stopping the harassment in the other class
The school did believe me after a lot of work from me. It didn't suspend me until a year later, after I'd been harassed in at least one class each in two other semesters. The school was tired of having me there by then, although it might have responded less harshly toward me after the prominence of Me Too. This all took place before that, and I was called a liar in no uncertain terms, forced to drop 4 classes without being allowed to finish the work for them, and banned from the campus. The final 4 grades on that transcript are F's, which means that transferring somewhere else is going to be difficult if not impossible.
All of this was interpreted by the psychiatrist as proof of my mental instability.
There are no perfect victims. However, there are perfect situations for an endless procession of predators, and of people who think they might enjoy trying out predatory behavior toward someone who is portrayed as deserving it.
